Keep up to date on Gears

We've been pretty busy responding to initial bugs, but we wanted to take a moment to summarize some of the great discussion and community involvement that has already started happening.

API Abstractions

One thing we've tried to do with Gears is go for evolution over revolution. This is why we have built focused components that you can then build on. We expected that people would build broader abstractions on top of Gears APIs, much as the community has built on top of XMLHttpRequest.

It has already started:

There has been a fair amount of playing with the Database component, and its APIs.

gears-dblib allows you to work with objects/hashes, and wraps a few common patterns. Think selectAll(sql, function(row) {}).

Gears ORM is more about Person.select(), and object-y. I am sure we will see a port of ActiveRecord and Hibernate shortly!

GearShift ports ideas from ActiveRecord Migrations. We need to think about how to evolve the DB over time.

Our own Aaron Boodman has done some experimentation with a convenience wrapper around the Worker Pool API.

Some people asked if the presentation we used is available anywhere to download, and in fact it is. The presentation is part of the downloadable SDK tools and samples which includes a variety of Gears samples.

We've also had the pleasure of giving some interviews about Gears. Here are a couple you can listen to:

We're all extremely excited to see the early interest in Gears and we're committed to responding to your feedback as quickly as possible and making this a robust and useful toolkit for web applications. Let us know what you think, what's missing, and where we should focus our efforts.